


The Terrible Children

by galacticproportions



Series: The Ripening Stars [4]
Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Action and intrigue, Betrayal and forgiveness, Ethical Dilemmas, Everything is a mess, Force-Sensitive Finn, Gen, I love that there's an Ethical Dilemmas tag, Love is hair-raising, Multi, This is not the porn you're looking for
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-12
Updated: 2016-05-12
Packaged: 2018-06-08 00:11:24
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,565
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6830998
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/galacticproportions/pseuds/galacticproportions
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Rey has left the Resistance base and thrown in with the Dark Side. Finn and Poe and Chewbacca go to bring her back, or try to. But if they succeed, what then?</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Terrible Children

**Author's Note:**

> This is the continuation of the Ripening Stars series, but not the thrilling conclusion, yet. You can probably get by with just reading "On the Brink" if you don't want to read the whole thing right now.
> 
> Thanks as ever to lynx-eyed beta reader Nevanna, and to ineptshieldmaid for making me take a good hard look at Rey's reasons. I hope they satisfy.
> 
> The title of this story is also the title of a poem by Marilyn Hacker, and the epigraph is a line from that poem--a poem that also opens Samuel Delany's memoir, The Motion of Light in Water, which includes the story of a triad that works, for a while.

 

 _If I betray, you are the one betrayed. --_ Marilyn Hacker

 

 

Rey went in search of Kylo Ren because she'd tasted the darkness in herself, and she only ever again wanted to be around people she _wanted_ to hurt.

Now when she opens her mind to the Force, she feels its vast darkness continuous with hers, tinged with the smell of metal and the taste of salt. Sometimes it stalks her, and she whirls to face it. Sometimes it's a dance that sweeps her up. These are the best times, when the power and the horror pour through her. It's exactly right, how much it hurts, how sick it makes her feel.

Snoke's voice hovers in her mind while she practices, painting pictures of a galaxy subdued, cities in ruins, worlds' worth of people at her feet. It takes a while for her to realize that this is meant as motivation. He doesn't seem to notice her disinterest; he keeps telling her the same stories. She wonders if those smoking, stinking visions are what he wants or just what he thinks she must want, but it doesn't matter. As soon as she's learned all he has to teach, she'll be on her way. There must be someplace where no one will come near her. She lived that way before, she can do it again.

In the meantime, the days sink past each other, punctuated by tending her body's needs in the big, empty kitchen or the outhouse or in dreamless sleep on mats in one of the rooms off the main hall where Snoke, or at least his holo, appears to them at the end of each day. She and Kylo stand before him while he rakes his approval or disapproval across their minds, playing them off each other in a way that's transparent. It irritates her, but it nearly crushes him, and on the mornings after Snoke praises her his attacks are more frenzied than ever. She's made herself a new lightsaber, darkly gleaming like blood from the vein.

The grounds of the little hillside _estate_ (a word she hadn't known before) are nearly empty of sentients. When she asked how come, Kylo Ren told her that Hux had dropped him off, wounded, with the four stormtroopers she's seen and felt on the premises. His master had healed him, he said, and that was that. Hux had left soon after, on some business or other. Kylo seems incurious about where, and he claims not to know the name of the moon they're on, the name of its planet or the system.

At first she thought he was withholding them, or had been instructed to withhold them, before they were sure of her. But she's come to the conclusion that he really doesn't know. It isn't important to him. All that matters to him, or seems to, is his struggle to vanquish the light in himself, and it seems to take up all his time and every bit of his energy.

That's not what it's like for her. The dark rewards her. Sometimes it's freefall, stomach-dropping and simple. Sometimes it feels like the Force is wielding her as its weapon, not the other way around.

*

In the lower left of the viewport hangs a little disk of tan and rust and green and blue and white, barely big enough to hold an atmosphere, and somewhere on it is the person they're here to find. They can make out seas and coastlines, and what looks like a storm near the equator.

"Let's talk options," Poe says, all business. "What'll they do if they're scanning when we enter orbit?"

"Probably hail us, then ask us to state our business or provide a code, or both. We don't have a good answer for that, so they'll probably send ships up from the surface to take us out. If they have ships. For all I know, they could have something ground-to-space that could pop us out of the sky. We don't know anything about how long they've been here, if this is a last resort or someplace they prepared--anything." Finn's talking too much. Smoothes his hands down his thighs, forces his pace slower. "If we enter atmo without communication, and they detect it, they'll try to shoot us down without parley, would be my guess. But if we come in fast, and near where they're based, we might make it as far as the ground--they might not have time to get in the air."

"I can't maneuver in atmo in this tub. Can you...hear...where they are? Where Rey is?"

"I tried, but I can't. Maybe from orbit I could do it, maybe I'd have to be on the surface. Sorry."

Chewbacca growls that sorry never captured a fat hrunil, and that they should shit or get off the pot. "He's right," Poe says. "If anyone down there has a long-range scanner, they could already know we're here."

"Okay," Finn says, after a moment of thought that barely counts as thought. "I say we enter orbit, scan for anything that looks like it could be a First Order base on a large scale, and I'll listen for Rey."

"Fine. But if anyone starts shooting at us, we leave orbit and make a different plan. And the closer you can get us, the happier I'll be--this isn't a big moon, but there's no point wasting time. You know what we're looking for--can you program the scanners?"

The thrusters fire and they lurch, and Finn swears he can feel the moon's gravity seize the ship like a giant hand. The scans don't reveal anything on the scale they'd expect for a major military installation. He goes through what's become his ritual of listening, but eventually has to shake his head and say, "I think we have to land."

On the plus side, no one has hailed them and no one has fired on them, so either it's reasonably safe to land or it's a trap that will get them all killed. They go through the routine--most familiar to Chewie, but standard for all of them by this time--of checking all systems in preparation for entering the atmosphere and strapping in against the suddenness of gravity. They plow through clouds and into rust-red sand.

*

Rey sits in a grove of trees, but her mind is a vast, black plain she has to cross, echoing with voices she's required to ignore. She remembers that in another place, she used to count the days. There are no days here. There is no time. There is only the goal: to not look back, whatever she hears. To know that nothing else matters, except what she wants.

Snoke, she knows, is taking the voices from her memory. It occurred to her only after she arrived that he could lift the location of the Resistance base just as easily, now that her mind is open to him, and she almost fainted with horror and shame. But he didn't. He hasn't even probed for it; she's sure she'd feel it. So it must be that he doesn't want to know, that what he wants isn't what the First Order wants, that his plans for the galaxy, for _her,_ lie elsewhere.

In her mind's ear she hears Han Solo the moment before he falls, more sharply than she heard him then, and with more echo. She hears the scrabble and choke of the second man she killed, with a blow to the throat, on Jakku. Civilians scream on Takodana. An unfamiliar woman's voice calling her name makes her feet stumble and the blood drain from her lips, but she keeps walking, her pride increasing with each step.

The words she hears in Finn's voice, then, are not the cold and angry words he said to her before she left; he's pleading for her help, in a way she's never heard and wouldn't expect from him. She frowns; she thought more of her teacher. This is a cheap trick, a fool's trick. Walking is easier now, and the voices are easier to ignore--even the shrieks and grunts of pain--though the black ground is hot as midday sand under her imagined feet.

And then she frowns again, because there's something flaring at the edge of the plain, a presence that doesn't come from the vision, a brightness without fever, a mind she knows. "Nothing," she mutters to herself, or thinks she does, "it's nothing, keep walking." But now she's the one who's lying, and the vision fades, replaced by crisp air and sunlight brushing the trunks of pine and ashtagiu, and a voice in her head that's very real and not her own: "It seems we have guests," the voice says. "We must prepare to receive them."

*

The town is built out on the lake, tethered with causeways that make Finn think of a narrow bridge over a long drop, and two figures meeting in the middle, and one falling. Sentients and droids pass them, but no one stops them or even asks them questions. In town, they buy fresh fruit and soft, sour, folded bread to supplement their ration bars, and Chewbacca pays a discreet visit to the back of a butcher shop. They have some funds, and they opt to rent rooms over an instrument-maker's. "These people aren't First Order," Finn says firmly. "This moon isn't First Order-controlled. They're too... all over the place, and they're not scared enough. That guy who tried to pick your pocket, he wouldn't even be here, he'd be dead. You wouldn't get rooms like this on a First Order world, you'd get polish or you'd get rubble." He unravels the edge of the floor mats a little further to illustrate his point.

"Then maybe Luke was wrong. Maybe she's here for some other reason." Poe's been on edge since they landed; he's picking at his fingers again, and Finn longs to cover Poe's hand with his palm and still it. "She _is_ here, right? You can still sense her?"

"Yeah. To the--east, or whatever you want to call it. The morning side. I think I can walk us toward her, if there isn't too much else in the way."

Chewbacca suggests that they get some sleep. Finn says, "I should practice," but the other two vote him down; there's not enough space in the room itself, and the roof, which they can reach if they go out in the hall and climb a rickety staircase, would attract too much attention. Chewie stretches out pointedly on one of the beds, which here are bundles of some kind of sweet-smelling dried plant tucked in fabric and not that high off the floor. The bed rustles. Poe and Finn look at each other.

"I can take the floor," Poe says. "I've slept worse places."

"I think I might stay up for a while. Try some exercises that don't need the lightsaber."

"You can't stay up all night. Go ahead, take the bed, it's fine. Look." Poe stretches out on the floor between the two mattresses. "See? Comfy."

Finn sighs and lies down. The bed creaks under him; it smells like a field. He closes his eyes and seeks sleep, tries to damp out his awareness of Poe lying an arm's reach away.

In the morning, at the caf-stand and the public baths, they ask a few questions they hope are discreet: strangers? Stormtroopers? Unusual ship traffic? A very tall man, dressed in black? "Say you think he walked off with your girl," Poe suggests, but Finn can't make his mouth form the words, and he notices that Poe doesn't step into that particular breach. They learn nothing; the people here either don't know, don't care, or are the collective victims of a colossal mind trick. "They're probably on the other side of the moon," Poe groans. "We're gonna be walking for months."

"I don't think so," Finn says. "We're on the right continent, we're in the right region. They're...not close, but not far. A few days, maybe."

In the afternoon, emboldened by everyone's indifference, they spend most of what's left of their funds paying for a fortnight's mooring at the town's little port, provisions, and a self-assembling tent. Loaded down, they set off along another causeway, to the lake's far side. "If we do find her, getting back is gonna be a problem," Poe points out. "Chewie, what if you went back and stayed with the ship?"

Chewbacca indicates that he thinks this is a stupid idea and that he doesn't trust the two of them to defend themselves without him.

"How come I can understand you now?" Finn asks. "I didn't use to be able to, and it's not like I took lessons."

"You just got better at hearing what I was saying."

"General Organa explained this to me once," Poe says. "Shryiwook has words, but about half the meaning is tone and timbre, and we understand it the way we hear tones of voice, or see body language. Wookiees create a lot more nuances with those things than humans do, and we don't pick up all of it. But the more we listen, the more we understand."

"You can stop talking about me like I'm not here anytime," Chewbacca says, and adds that maybe now would be a reasonable time to make an actual plan for what they're going to do if they actually get where they're trying to go, which is looking more doubtful by the minute.

"We don't know anything about what kind of ... situation she's in," Finn says. "We don't know if she's a prisoner, or if she's escaped and sneaking around like she was last time, or if she's with them. Joined them."

"You thought of that too, huh? Is ... Kylo Ren here? Can you tell?"

The way Poe says that name: like he's trying to get hold of it, grip it, prove it has no power over him. Finn says, "I can't." Can't tell. Can't stop it. He wants to say, _I won't let him near you,_ but he knows the frailty of a promise. He says, "We're just gonna have to deal with whatever we find. If he _is_ there, let me be the one to get in front of him. I'm getting pretty good with this thing," gesturing toward the lightsaber at his belt, trying to make it a joke. They're cutting through woods now, uphill, and the undergrowth makes it slow going. His sense of Rey ahead of him is like a rope lashed to his breastbone: all he has to do is follow it.

*

Rey is fasting. "It's because your body is an instrument," Kylo has explained to her--he loves to explain things. "It doesn't matter what you do with it. It's just a channel for power."

She wants to ask him if he's ever gone hungry not to prove something, not to please someone, not to learn something, not even to gain something, but because there just was no food, because there might never be food again. If he's ever dragged himself into shade because he was too weak to stand and in the sun he'd die for sure. If he's ever survived by an unlikely conjunction of chance and kindness. She never knew whose shadow fell across her, making her think _This is the end,_ but who instead of killing her dribbled broth into her mouth. They also took most of that day's haul, but not all of it. They left her enough for a quarter-portion.

She isn't to think about that now. It doesn't matter. Their weakness was her gain, and that's all there is to it. She's to stay still, ignoring her belly's demands to get up now, go scavenge more, there's so much day left. This isn't hard necessity any longer; this is a choice she's making. Has made. A choice she's made.

Rey walks out of the house, toward the woods. With each step, anger builds in her. She doesn't ask who it's for, what its target is, but follows it into the core of her being, concentrated and blue-white like the hottest stars, and plucks from her breastbone a quarterstaff of burning light. It hovers in her hand impossibly; she swings it.

The blade of pure Force rends the daylight and cuts a tree in half. She walks over, smells the fresh oozing sap, touches the newly jagged parts. Until a few cycles ago, she'd never even seen a tree before.

She feels Snoke tap her mind: is that impatience? His or hers? "Soon you will cut down armies," he says. She can feel, through him, how each death would amplify the wave of power that lifts and roars through her, many times over.

The blade flickers away and out. (Where does it go?) She stands panting and shaking, a light wind raising the hairs on her arms and the back of her neck.

*

They travel for three days through dry upland forest, with Finn's sense of Rey as their compass. If she were here, he thinks, he'd point leaf-shapes and bird-sounds out to her, just for the pleasure of seeing her see something new, of being with her in a place where things grow green and tall. Except that if they could be walking in the woods and looking at things, not fighting and not running, he wouldn't be in these particular woods in the first place.

The undergrowth is tinder-dry, and they're careful with their fire, but Chewbacca catches some kind of fat, earless, nonsentient animal--at least, Finn hopes it's nonsentient--and Poe guts and skins it for roasting with an aplomb that surprises him. "My tío had a farm," Poe explains, stabbing the knife blade in the dirt to clean it. "My mother's brother," seeing the question forming on Finn's lips. "I used to have to get the pigeons and the hrunili ready for the table, when we visited over there."

They've talked about Poe's family before--his mother, the Rebel pilot and the General's friend, dead for years now, and his father, still living, though Poe doesn't talk to or about him much. Finn doesn't know why. Poe doesn't sound like he misses them now, just ordinary, no big deal, people have mothers and mothers have brothers and sometimes your mother's brother sends you out into the yard to kill and gut a small animal. It makes Finn wonder suddenly and sharply what Poe would be like, who he'd be, without the Resistance. Or if the war ever--in some way he can't even imagine--ended, and they were somehow still alive.

*

Rey and Kylo Ren are sparring. Her Force blade jars against the sore red of his lightsaber. "I can get rid of those sparks for you," she offers again, at this point more to taunt him and throw him off his stance than because she thinks he'll accept.

"I like it how it is." He almost gets under her guard, but she's whip-agile and cool-headed, and is behind him with her weapon an inch from his kidney before he spins again. He says, "Your friends are getting closer," seeming to have some trouble with the word _friends._

"You can feel them too." It isn't a question, really; she's not sure why she said it, or why she thought it might not be true.

"Of course." They fight on a while in silence, barring the sizzle and hiss and the wind in the high branches, as he tries to force her around to where the sun will be in her eyes. He says, "They're going to be your test. Like Han Solo was mine."

"Hm," she says. "Did you pass or fail that one, do you think?" And then she really is surprised when his attack doubles in ferocity, wordless now, and it's all she can do to keep him at blade's length.

*

On the third day they strike a trail that leads roughly in the direction they want to go, and make better time, leaving it only to answer calls of nature and once to follow a stream to a place deep enough to bathe. A bulky human carrying a bowcaster and dressed to blend in with the undergrowth gives them a curious look but barely breaks stride on the way past. "It's _damn_ eerie that no one seems to care that we're here," Poe mutters, and Chewbacca tells him not to be stupid, why should anyone other than the First Order care that they're here, or want to know who they are? This is a well-used trail; they could be on it for any reason, going from wherever it started to wherever it leads.

On the third night, the nightmares come.

It takes Finn an untold, horrifying time to realize that he's lying on his back in the tent, every muscle rigid, and that Rey is not slumped in front of him with his lightsaber blade through her chest and her mouth open like she's about to ask a question. It takes more time still before he realizes that the sound he can hear outside the tent is Poe throwing up. He rises and stumbles over a groaning Chewbacca, trying to shake him awake as he goes out into the starlight.

Poe is just a hunched-over, heaving shadow, and though Finn is still trembling himself he gets over to him and puts a hand on his back. And Poe swings on him, sends him sprawling, on his back on the forest floor and the air gone from his lungs before he understands what's happened.

"Finn? Oh, shit, I'm sorry. Shit, hell, are you okay?" Poe's helping him up, brushing him off, kicking dirt and leaves over the puddle of vomit, and doubling over again to shake, whispering, "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry." This time Finn keeps his hands to himself and waits. Chewbacca has woken up the rest of the way too and is out of the tent, like a tree trunk against the moonlight, mumbling, "What the fuck."

Finn manages to move enough to find their canteen and hand it to Poe, squatting down to his level so he won't loom. "Rinse your mouth," he suggests, and Poe does, gagging and spitting. "I thought I was done with that," he says, as if he's speaking around the taste of vomit.

"Yeah, me too. I guess not." Finn stands again, knees creaking. "I don't know if I can get back to sleep," he says. "I'm gonna practice a little."

"Me either. I'll watch you." Poe swallows. "If that's okay."

Chewbacca grunts something about sleep and foolishness, and returns to the tent. Finn pulls the lightsaber from his belt and opens his stance. He feels a wash of the sick, dizzy horror that swept over him when first he picked it up, and Rey's face from the nightmare hovers in front of him. _It wasn't real,_ he tells himself, _breathe through it. She's still alive, you'd feel it if she died. This is for her. This is so you can get her out._ He moves into his practice routine, feels calm descend, but feels, too, Poe's eyes on him, though he can't read their expression. He can't hear what's inside Poe's head either--not by accident, and of course not on purpose. Right now that seems like a gift.

*

"You will face them alone," says the hologram man inside Rey's head.

She says nothing. She knows, now, not to speak unless he asks her a direct question.

"How you strike them down is up to you," he says. "But they die, or you all die together."

She isn't sure he means it. In the visions that he shares with them, she sees how useful it'll be to him, yoking Kylo's rage to her poise. She knows how strong she's become, and how controlled. It's dazzling to her to feel the power of undoing gather and release. She could stop their hearts by thinking of it, she feels sure.

She could do it before they get here.

They would never have to see her. They would never have to know.

"No, child. This is to prove to me, and to you, where you belong. You will give them no more gifts."

Rey bows low. It's a compromise they've come to: she shows obeisance with her actions, and he no longer demands it in her words. But as she tries to rise she feels a pressure on the back of her neck that turns to pain, driving her to her knees. "You will kneel to me--" the pressure eases, and she finds she can stand--"but only to me. We will stand astride the galaxy."

Fury gleams white-hot in her core, but she doesn't know how or where to strike. He's withdrawn his presence, and she's panting, slowly letting the anger dissipate the way she learned--but not from him--from--

Rey banishes the past and goes to find Kylo for more sparring practice. It's the best thing when she feels this way. She checks every room before finding him outside, wearing a path in the sparse grass of the hillside. There is no room in the echoing house she hasn't been in, but Snoke is in none of them, unless you count the banquet hall where his hologram appears. Did he leave? When? Was he ever here?

The four stormtroopers patrol the perimeter and prepare the food in a kitchen that must have once fed twenty; every so often (how often?) two of them shed the uniform and take a speeder to the lake town and bring back supplies. She's never seen them in the room where Snoke appears; they're obviously terrified of her and Kylo, and she's barely spoken to them. She has never hurt them. On balance, she's hurt fewer people on this moon, since her embrace of the darkness, than anywhere else she's been.

What is anger without somewhere to direct it? What is power without someone to use it on? Where does it go? _Strike me down and I will become more powerful than you can imagine,_ someone seems to say, but not Snoke and not Kylo, no voice she's ever heard before.

*

It's after the second sleepless night and dead-eyed, snappish day that Chewbacca suggests the nightmares might not be natural. The sound he makes to convey _unnatural_ works on Finn's nerves with horror, suggesting not just dark uses of the Force but murderous rituals and the unquiet dead, things from nightmares not his own. Poe brushes at his face as though a cobweb had snagged it. "You think someone's sending us bad dreams? We have bad dreams all the time."

"I don't," Chewbacca says firmly. "Barely dream at all."

It's hard to think, but Finn says, "That must mean Kylo Ren _is_ here," and then regrets it as he sees Poe's jawline harden. Poe says, "Unless Rey's doing it herself," and looks like _he_ regrets it, but he pushes on: "Nobody's said it yet, and we have to. Whoever we find there--it might not be her anymore."

"It'll be her," Finn says, hearing the stubbornness in his own voice. "Even if, even if she's fallen, it'll still be her. Everyone has the light _and_ the dark in them. Everyone, everything. She told me that. If the darkness in her is winning, that just means it's winning. It means she always had it in her, to be like this." He doesn't even know who he's arguing with, now. "You saw her, Poe, on the space station, when you came to get me out. She wasn't just pretending, then. She scared me."

"She was scary," Poe agrees. "But what are you trying to say? Whether it's her or it isn't her or whatever, what are we going to _do,_ if we get there and she's gone over to the Dark Side? Shit, I hate even _saying_ 'the Dark Side.'"

The blade through her chest. Her face turned up, mouth open, as if to ask a question.

"I don't know yet," he says, and feels himself swaying. "Do you think--maybe if we tried to sleep now, they wouldn't--"

They don't even manage to get the tent up, but slump just off the path, at the foot of one of the biggest trees, and against each other. The fallen needles are fragrant and yielding; the sun is high and piercing the canopy when they close their eyes, and dropped near to the horizon when they open them.

A little better rested, scratching at welts that some insect or other raised while they were sleeping, they walk till planetset, guided by Chewie's night vision. As the moon's planet sinks, Finn feels the tug of Rey's presence leading them away from the path, into thick brush and maybe the sinkholes that sometimes open between the trees' wide roots, so any more progress has to wait till morning. Chewbacca sighs that he might as well go out to hunt. Finn and Poe put up the tent to keep the bugs out, and talk to keep awake.

Or try to. "I can't help it," Poe says finally, after grinding to a halt in the middle of a story about a supply raid gone wrong. "If he's there... It's all I can think about. I don't know what it's gonna be like, when I see him. I don't trust myself."

"He'll have to go through me to get to you." This is what Finn decided he would say if it came up again. It feels a little overdramatic, but it has the advantage of being true, and a promise he can actually keep.

"What about Rey?"

"Her too. Of course."

"No, I mean: will Rey have to go through you to get to me?"

Of course. Of course it's a possibility. Of course, if she's given in to the Dark Side, he might end up standing between them. He hadn't let himself see it, and now it fills his vision. He puts his face in his hands, something they used to beat him for when he was a kid, and presses the heels of his palms into his eye sockets as if he could blot it out.

He says finally, "I can't promise. I don't know what I'll do." He can't look at Poe; he looks at the floor of the tent. "When I saw you on the Finalizer I thought, this person doesn't deserve to die, and maybe this is my chance to get away from killing. And then somehow that turned into, I'd die for this person. But I don't know if I can--" He swallows hard. "I don't trust myself either."

"I trust you," Poe says.

"Don't. I'm telling you."

"It's worked out pretty good for me so far." There's not a trace of irony in his voice, and Finn looks up. The danger, the nightmares, the injuries, the bitterness between them--none of that counts? Poe's saying now, "I trust you to do the right thing. Remember you said that? 'Because it's the right thing to do?' I thought you were feeding me a line--"

"I kinda was--"

"--but it was true, too. You always think about what the right thing is. I know you don't always know, but you always ask _._ If it's not possible to do the right thing where we're going, I trust you to do the _most_ right thing. I mean that. Can you--uh--can you feel that I mean it?"

"I can't feel anything you're feeling," Finn says. "I don't pick it up by accident, and I wouldn't try."

"See, that's what I'm saying. I do mean it. I trust you."

"With your _life._ It's your life we're talking about. _"_

"With my life, Finn."

Serious face, serious voice, looking at him without even a trace of bravado, which for Poe is more naked than nakedness. "I wanna kiss you again," Finn says, which also has the advantage of being true, even though he hadn't planned to say it.

Poe says, "I want you to," but doesn't move, so Finn has to be the one to awkwardly half-stand and knock his head against the tent roof and kneel next to Poe, bend to him, take his head in his hands and kiss him. It's a long, still moment before Poe brings one hand to Finn's shoulder and another to his waist, and they fit together entirely.

The familiar heat is there, but it's patient. They just kiss and kiss, like they have an infinite amount of time for anything they'd ever want to do. Which means the kisses are partly lies. Finn doesn't care. Eventually Chewie comes in from the hunt and comments, "Humans waste a lot of time. It's getting light, we should get moving."

As they collapse the tent, he adds that he went in the direction Finn had indicated, off the path, and come to a place where the trees thin out, leaving some kind of low-growing plant, a series of swampy-looking ponds, and a low, sprawling building on the rising ground. "They're there. Or they were. It smells right."

"You can smell them?" Finn asks.

Chewbacca looks, incredibly, _embarrassed,_ and mutters something less intelligible than usual about knowing some smells anywhere. "Let's go," he says with a jerk of his head, and lopes off into the undergrowth.

They follow. Finn is still light-headed and his mouth feels warm. He says, "Poe," speaking quietly, because he doesn't know how close they are to where they're going.

"Yeah?"

"I would've thought you'd be angrier. About Rey--doing what she did. Not this, I mean, before, making us feel what she felt. I would've thought it would bother you more."

"It did. It scared me. But you know--" and Poe grins back over his shoulder--"I like risks." This is true, Finn knows, Poe likes to go toward the thing that scares him. "That's what it felt like, a risk. Not a threat, not an ... invasion." His face sobers. "But I didn't have any right to sign you up for it without you knowing. I'm still mad at myself about that."

"I'm mad at you too," Finn says. "But not as mad as I was." He sighs. "Chewie's right, I wasted a lot of time."

"No," Poe says, and stops dead, earning a dirty backward look from Chewbacca. "No. That was not a waste of time. There's nothing more important, nothing, than you being--than nobody--" He stops. Finn waits. "Than nobody doing anything to you that you don't want, ever again," Poe says finally. "Anything that keeps you free, that's a good thing."

Chewbacca makes an impatient sound, and they start walking again. The trees thin out, and they see the low shape of the building at the crest of a hill. "That it?" Poe asks.

Finn reaches out cautiously with his mind. Feels it brush against what he recognizes as Rey, but this close there's a difference in it, a tinge of hot metal. "Yeah, that's it." He looks at the other two. "Plan?"

"We don't know how many of them there are," Poe says, "and we don't know what kind of firepower they have. This place doesn't look military and it doesn't look that busy, but there's a lot we can't see. I don't like that hill."

"Can we find out without showing ourselves? I think we should go in carefully, but with weapons ready and from two directions. If there's people who--who aren't her, stormtroopers or whatever, shoot to temporarily disable, not to kill." Finn's speaking with a lot more confidence than he feels, but they need to move forward somehow. Chewbacca volunteers to go around to the right, alone, and unshoulders his gear except for the bowcaster. "You sure?" Finn asks.

"I'm going to bring that whelp back to his mother," Chewbacca says calmly, or as calm as he gets.

They both stare. He stares back down at them, toothy and unperturbed. "Okay then," Finn says. "Poe, you're with me, but I want you to fall back if the lightsabers come out." He holds up a hand to forestall objections. "Or if you see Kylo Ren and get shook. It's not your kind of fight. It'd be like putting me in an X-wing. Okay?"

"Okay," Poe says, with what sounds like a mix of reluctance and relief. "Hey, listen to you. When we get back, we're gonna have to talk to the General about a command position for you."

There's absolutely nothing he can say to that. "I don't know what we're gonna see out there, but--if Rey won't come with us, if we can't convince her, if this is what she chooses, then we retreat. We protect each other, we protect ourselves. And we leave her here." It chokes him even to say that. He'd never intended to leave her again, or to let her be taken from him.

And no one says what they're all probably thinking: that if they leave her here alive and fallen, they're leaving a much greater danger for the galaxy later on. No one says that she may not even let them leave. Beautiful Rey, with her capacity for wonder, her eagerness, her ingenuity, her laughter. Kind Rey, who promised once that she would take nothing from them that they didn't want to give.

This could end up being the worst, most catastrophic decision he'll ever make. It could end up being the last.

"Let's go," he says.

*

She's looking out the window, but she senses them long before they're in sight, like cool lights on the edge of the desert of her vision. Like sips of water. Far away, and not for her, except to extinguish, to spill.

"I'll go out with you," she hears from a corner of the abandoned, dusty hall, where a long piece of shadow is detaching itself.

"Master Snoke said I'm to do it myself," she snaps.

"Come out back and spar with me," he suggests. "Maybe they'll think we're really fighting, and come close, and then it'll be easy." He stands close to her. "I want to see it," he says softly. "I want to watch you kill that traitor, and that pilot who thinks he's so _brave_."

"Keep your distance," she says, moving away from him and toward the door. "C'mon, then, let's spar."

They're almost a perfect match now, his reach and her agility, his power and her precision. Half her mind she gives to meeting his attack, the other half to their approach. She feels Chewbacca peel off, feels the other two wing two of the stormtrooper guards and round the corner of the house, so when they appear over the brow of the hill she's already swinging to face them: Finn in the lead and Poe behind a half-step. When they see her, they stop.

"Rey," Finn says, and she hears his voice as if from a great distance away, or over the sound of a sandstorm against the walls of an AT-AT, a long time ago. She says, feeling Kylo's hot, tense presence tightening the air at her elbow, "You shouldn't have come here."

"I wanted to," he says. "We want you to come home."

"I don't want to go," she says, "I don't want to go, and that _isn't my home."_ The Force blade springs back to life between her hands, and she begins to stalk.

Finn stays still and braced, she can tell he's watching her and waiting, but he doesn't move, why doesn't he move? She advances on him: surely he'll defend himself, surely he'll give her a reason to strike, he won't just _stand there_ and let her--

"Traitor," Kylo calls softly across the grass. "Traitor, fool. It was all for nothing. Look at her now. All you can do for her is die."

Finn's expression doesn't change. _Stupid,_ she thinks, _that isn't the way to make him angry, he wouldn't even care about that._ And then her own anger's there, a darkness that makes the blade burn brighter, because how _dare_ he, how dare he come for her, as if she mattered, as if she were _good,_ doesn't he _know_ that this is what she is? Her attack is bold but high, and Anakin Skywalker's lightsaber comes up to meet it.

She's surprised by how good at this Finn's gotten. He's concentrating on keeping her at bay, not going on the attack, but she can't get through his guard. She quiets her admiration, deliberately increases her intensity, and at that moment in her peripheral vision she sees Kylo Ren stride forward and press his lightsaber to Poe's throat.

Finn sees it too and his attention wavers, which was no doubt the plan. His arm drops, and Rey's blow sends him staggering, his lightsaber spinning away, his hand blistering.

Poe says, "Hey, _Ben,_ your mother would've sent her regards, but she's probably dying. You know that? Did you feel it when she collapsed? Did you know it was her heart?"

And Chewbacca strides forward as if from nowhere and pinions Kylo's arms to his sides, lightsaber and all, growling into his ear in a register Rey can't hear. He doesn't fight back. He seems almost not to know where he is. The undertones of Chewbacca's voice roll like faraway thunder, shaking them all with betrayal, forgiveness, longing, home. Finn still hasn't tried to get up and Poe's half-collapsed too, wincing and gasping. Her gaze darts back and forth among them and settles on Finn again, her arm trembling as she levels her Force blade at his chest.

His face is calm. His eyes meet hers, and hold. And it's like he's dropping _every_ weapon, every defense, every piece of armor that would get in the way of the light she feels streaming from and through him, out towards her, and meeting in her the wave of darkness that rises up from behind and within her.

They meet in her; they find in her an answering darkness and light. She holds them. In perfect balance.

She can see _everything,_ feel _everything,_ limned in brightness, veined with shadow. It's like someone took the roof off the top of her head, off the sky, filling her with a vastness whose center is everywhere.

The Force blade blinks out and a moment later her mind follows it, thinking of nothing.

*

As soon as Rey falls, Kylo Ren rips free of Chewbacca's hold and stumbles toward the house. Finn registers that Chewbacca moves as if to follow him, and checks himself; he sees Poe rise and break into a run and come towards them, him and Rey, on the ground where they both fell, sees the lightsaber's proximity burn along Poe's jaw. "We need to get away from here," he says urgently, "both of you get up, come on."

Chewbacca grunts, "I'll carry her," and lifts Rey to his shoulder, and Poe helps Finn up, and they head for the woods, stopping only to scoop up the packs.

It's a long trek back, and at first Finn has trouble keeping track of what's happening. He feels scorched and hollow, and his vision keeps haloing. Poe makes him eat, he's pretty sure, and other moments stand out from his consciousness: pissing against a tree amid the hum of insects; the weight of the lightsaber at his belt again; Poe's hand gentle and grateful on the back of his neck.

Rey regains consciousness somewhere around the second night, but won't speak at first, or can't. She can walk, though, and does, as fast as they dare make her go. She doesn't try to run or leave; she strives earnestly to keep up.

The stormtroopers catch up with them anyway. Finn knows they're stormtroopers because they're wearing the black undersuits, but their helmets and armor are gone. One's arm and shoulder are bandaged and the other's missing the sleeve he transformed into a field sling. "We're not here to hurt you," the bandaged one says, holding up his good hand in surrender as Poe brandishes a blaster. "We want to come with you. You're FN-2187, aren't you?"

Finn does remember saying, "I used to be, but it's Finn now," and hearing Chewie gargle a question and saying, "Sure, let them come, what the hell, we have room," even though they don't--not in the tent, and not really in the ship. He doesn't even know if it'll take off with six people, if life support will stand it--anything. He falls asleep trying to make it work. They still don't know anything about why these stormtroopers and Kylo Ren were here, on a moon with no other apparent First Order presence, and maybe these two will have something to tell the General about that, if she's still alive.

But more importantly, RR-2094 and RR-2026 are ready to be free. Finn can hear it in their voices, even through his daze, even as their conditioning struggles to reassert itself. He helps them however he can, talking to them when they wake in the night. He wonders what their key to deconditioning was, listens for it so he can boost them as they fight to speak, as they choose their names--Yaro first, then Dau, syllables that must sound right to them--and as they ask tentative, thick-tongued questions about where they're going.

They become more lucid and livelier with every step--and talking them through it actually helps to clear his mind. Maybe it's because they're not prisoners or unsuspecting soldiers, but people who, like him, chose to leave, who've come to him to help them become themselves.

It seems important to say to them, "You can decide. You don't have to throw in with the Resistance. I'm glad I did, but you don't have to, you can go anywhere. We can drop you off anywhere you want." He wonders again about possible intel, but he can't make himself think of these two as resources more than people. "I think," he amends. "I should probably check. Anywhere in particular you wanna go? The galaxy's a big place." He's talked himself lightheaded, and stops.

"We'll follow you," Dau says, like it's obvious.

"I feel like I should tell you not to do that."

"We heard about you." Yaro grins and swats a bug. "We wanted to be like you. Some of us did. The other guys that were with us, they didn't, they took off, they're gonna do whatever they're gonna do, but we want to come with you."

"I _broke your arm,_ " he reminds Yaro.

"Yeah," Yaro says after a second, "but you didn't know it was me."

Rey begins to ask questions, too, as they get further from the place where they found her. She asks Chewbacca, "Would you really have brought him back?"

"I wanted to," Chewbacca says, his voice near a howl. "I tried, but I couldn't have held him any longer without killing him."

Finn hears her ask Poe, "Is Leia really dying?"

"I exaggerated a little bit to piss him off," Poe admits. "We don't actually know how she is, but the part about the heart attack was true. She was alive when we left, but we haven't been in communication with the base." Rey's silent for a long while after that.

But later that day she asks Finn, "How did you do that?"

He tries to answer her honestly. "I just tried to make a path for the light. I don't know how else to say it. And I don't know if I could do it again."

"I felt how it could be," is all she says, then.

They sleep without nightmares. He asks her about it; he's decided he just wants to know whatever he can know. No more secrets. It's easier to talk when they're walking; staying on his feet occupies just enough of his mind, and they don't have to look directly at each other. "I wasn't doing that," she says. "But I don't...maybe Snoke was doing it through me. I don't know how that works."

"Snoke was here?"

"I don't know," she says hesitantly. "I thought he was. It seemed like he was. Especially at first. He was in my head." Finn doesn't even know if he can fix his mouth to ask the next question, if he'll swear at her, or cry, but she seems to guess and say, "He isn't now. When I felt--everything--it's like it shook him loose, like there wasn't any room for him. I'm not bringing him with us." Time is still a little fuzzy for him, but it feels like a long lag before she speaks again. "I would stay here. If it was like that."

He thinks, _The last time you made me a promise, you broke it. Why should I believe you now?_ He tries to answer that like it's a real question: what would make him believe her? More days, more nights. More chances for her to hurt him, for them to hurt each other. It's not like this is news to him.

They all stink; they've made one detour to find water and splash away at least the top layer of filth, but none of them have really bathed in days, and the first few minutes in the tent at night are always a struggle before his nose gets used to it. But the crowdedness means he can lie close to Poe again without thinking about it. He doesn't touch Rey; neither of them do. But he feels her there, her particular gravity, and he finds he's glad of it.

They reach the port at the fifth moonrise. Since the fight, Chewbacca has been almost as silent as Rey: now he says what Finn has already figured, that the ship won't carry all of them. He and Dau and Yaro will work their way back to Resistance territory, he says, or at least neutral space. They'll catch up. "Tell Leia and Luke I'm on my way," he says.

Finn wonders if he's going to try to go after Kylo Ren again, and what he'll do if he finds him. How much does a person have to ruin before you give up on them? How long can you keep trying to forgive them? He can't leave himself out of this: the harm he's already done, the harm he could have done, so easily, the harm he might yet do. The forgiveness he might go beyond someday. He touches Poe's arm to make sure he's still there.

They watch Chewbacca and his charges walk back toward the lake causeway to spend the night in town. Rey lifts her head and looks between the two of them with a hunted expression. It's Poe who holds out his arms for her to spill into them, Poe who murmurs, "Shh, shh, niña, it's okay, it's okay, it's okay."

Finn feels the untruth of this in his bones. It isn't okay. There's so much left, so much undone and so much to undo. So much to build anew, and no guarantee that they'll get the chance to build it. But when she raises her fierce tearless face from Poe's shoulder and turns and slowly holds her hand out to Finn, he takes it.

 

**Author's Note:**

> A further note on Finn's choices: Race as we create and perpetuate it doesn't seem to apply in the galaxy far far away, but I'm writing this, and you are reading it, in the world we know and the history we share. With that in mind, I'm aware that depicting a black character choosing a path of nonviolence and forgiveness in the face of violence and betrayal is not a neutral choice. I think that it's consistent with the man we met in SW:TFA, and with the character as I've written him throughout this series. But if you want to grapple with it in the comments, I am here.


End file.
